Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

A False Dichotomy

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. – Virginia Woolf

The neofeminist prohibitionists claim that all prostitutes are helpless victims of male dominance, slaves to “patriarchal oppressors”, and even many Americans who are rational but ill-informed have come to believe enough of the propaganda that they think “most” of us are coerced; even some escorts have bought into this notion sufficiently that they believe there are two and only two kinds of prostitutes, free-willed high-dollar independent escorts and pimped, coerced slaves. This, of course, is pure poppycock; human relationships and even free will itself are never as cut-and-dried as either the neofeminists or the dualists want to pretend. The notion that all prostitutes (or all workers, or all humans) must be either free or enslaved is a false duality which ignores both the realities of the human condition and the necessities of material existence.

The only people who can truly claim to have made an absolutely free choice to do any kind of work are the Paris Hiltons of the world, those who have a guaranteed inheritance, income and secured future no matter what they choose to do with the present. Every other person has no choice but to work in some fashion; the choice not to work at all simply doesn’t exist unless one considers starvation an option. At that point, then, the choice boils down to what kind of work one is able and willing to do. I’d just love to be paid to do what I’m doing right now – namely, writing about whatever I want to write whenever I want to write it, without answering to anybody – but in the real world very few people who aren’t already bestselling authors get that opportunity. Conversely, there are lots of things I’m quite able to do, but wouldn’t be willing to do regularly for pay. As I’ve described before, I eventually settled on sex work as the best way to get everything I wanted career-wise (high income, flexibility, freedom from arbitrary schedules and rules and no confiscatory “withholding”) while doing something I was already good at. In other words, escorting provided the greatest advantages for the least compromise. Eventually I made a slightly different choice, namely housewifery, when I came to a point in my life where it provided an even better fit than escorting had; the money was less and the responsibility greater, but the work was lighter and IMHO even more pleasant.

And I’m not remotely alone; millions of women all over the world and throughout history have chosen prostitution for similar reasons to mine. Each of them took stock of her assets, needs and preferences and decided that whoring was the best way to accomplish her goals. The neofeminists claim that only women with no other choice decide to become prostitutes, but that’s as ridiculous an assertion as it is simplistic; there are many, many poor, unskilled women in this world who would never choose whoredom, and many, many educated, talented women who do. Harlotry is not right for everyone, but then neither is teaching, nursing, motherhood, secretarial work or any other career. All but a very small number of us must work, and everyone who isn’t actually compelled by force to do some particular form of work has some choice, however limited it may be.

But what about those who are literally compelled? Obviously there are cases like the “comfort women”, but in modern times such forcible enslavement is comparatively rare, as our friend Jill Brenneman can tell you. Some of what the rescue industry calls “slavery” is actually debt bondage (a condition with which I daresay much of the American middle class is intimately familiar), but some of it isn’t even that; as Laura Agustín has discussed on numerous occasions, a great deal of the “trafficking” mythology is rooted in the racist assumption that people (especially women) from undeveloped countries are childlike simpletons who can easily be manipulated by oh-so-superior Westerners, and so they are “enslaved” by the evil white men and can only be “rescued” by the good white men. The “rescuers” presume that any foreign woman selling sex in Europe or the US is “trafficked”, when in reality the majority of them come of their own free will and the people who are labeled as “traffickers” are usually simply those who transported them and/or arranged for false papers. Not to be outdone, the fanatics are now trying to claim that the reason migrants deny being enslaved is not because it’s the truth, but rather because they’re suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome”! They simply cannot accept that some people really do prefer doing sex work to being virtual slaves in a sweatshop, and that they migrate not because they’re passively “trafficked” but because they’re actively looking for a better life than they could find in their own countries.

And what of the pimps? Even though they’re pretty rare, certainly we can all agree that for a man to force a woman into prostitution and then take her money is wrong, can’t we? Well…sort of. I’d agree that for a man to use force and intimidation to control a woman is wrong, but the percentage of prostitutes with abusive, controlling pimps is very similar to the percentage of women with abusive, controlling husbands or boyfriends; some men are just bastards and some women are (for whatever reason) willing to put up with it, and whores are no exception. At the most basic level, what is a pimp but a man who is supported by a woman’s work? Sex work is work like any other, so a prostitute supporting a pimp who lacks a literal hold on her is no morally different from any other woman supporting her husband or boyfriend with any other kind of work. Personally, I think for a wife to support an able-bodied man who isn’t a full-time student is pretty creepy, but I wouldn’t want it to be illegal because people have the right to make their own decisions, even if I or others think those decisions are bad, stupid or self-destructive. Besides, so-called “anti-pimping” laws do much more harm than good; under many legalization regimes it is illegal (usually felonious) to “live off the avails” (i.e. derive a large portion of one’s support from someone else’s prostitution), which means that a prostitute is barred from being married, supporting adult family members such as university-age children or invalid parents, or even hiring employees such as secretaries or bodyguards. Such laws are so obviously discriminatory that they were struck down last September in Ontario and Indian sex workers are fighting them, too.

Real life is not like a silent melodrama; the baddies do not all wear black hats and sport waxed moustaches, and many of the women who are tied to the railroad tracks are there because they consented to be and will not appreciate ham-fisted attempts at “rescue”. There is a whole spectrum between the party girl whoring herself for thrills and the chained sex slave, and the number of prostitutes at the one end is no higher than that at the other. The vast majority of us, like the vast majority of the human race, exist in the murky grey area between absolute freedom and abject slavery, trying our best to balance the pursuit of happiness with the toil necessary for survival.

41 Responses

I think the word ‘duality’ already gives us a clue that there’s a whole lot of missing bits between one pole and the other. Again, I have call up my grandpa, who said (words to the effect that) the world is not just black and white, that even grey is not enough, simply because the world is a spectrum of different colours. In the business of life, nothing is ever of one colour (or even several), a point that seems to escape these people you’re describing.

Maggie, you are the right girl at the right place at the right time. Do any of those trafficking crazies ever try to refute you, or do they just ignore you and hope you’ll go away? Please keep hammering them; God knows they’ve got it coming!

Well, they’re not really ignoring us collectively, just me individually. You may notice that a lot of prohibitionists now (not so much the sincere trafficking believers, but rather the cops, politicians and neofeminists who use it as an excuse for war on whores) feel compelled to call us liars and claim that voluntary adult prostitutes are “rare” when actually we’re the vast majority.

Maggie,
You express a belief in consensual activities between adults, yet you find “a wife [supporting] an able-bodied man who isn’t a full-time student [to be] pretty creepy.” Why? If it’s the situation that works best for a given couple — the wife wanting to work and providing well financially, and a husband who prefers the domestic role doing the cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing — why is that fundamentally any different than the reverse? I know at least a couple of couples for whom that would work well if the (workaholic) wife was making a sufficiently high salary. Or is the creepiness predicated on the stereotype of the beer-swilling, slobbish layabout and the frenzied working woman who then has to come home and take care of the housework as well?

I also support people being free to snort powder up their noses, jump out of perfectly good airplanes, waste half their lives watching television, spend huge proportions of their incomes buying “the newest and hottest” whatever, restrict themselves to eating nothing but raw vegetables, belong to the Republican or Democratic parties and any other number of questionable behaviors. Why is this one different? My feelings are my own, and are every bit as valid as anyone else’s. I don’t need a “reason” to feel that way, any more than I need a “reason” to be turned on by being tied up.

Everyone is free to feel what he feels without having to feel compelled to explain it to anybody, but NOBODY is justified in telling anyone else how to live his life. I’m squicked out by a woman supporting an able-bodied man, and a woman who likes that lifestyle might be squicked out by my being a whore, but in a truly free society we’d both be allowed our squickouts and neither of us would be able to do a damned thing about using those feelings to restrict or oppress the other.

Just to turn this over from the other end: you mentioned sweatshops. A similar argument — one that I somewhat agree with — has been used to defend overseas sweatshops. Do-gooders — usually the same ones fighting prostitution — insist that people are enslaved and that no one in their right mind would want to work in them. But sweatshops don’t lack for willing workers and when sweatshops are closed, we frequently see the former employees turning to … prostitution or other endeavors. It’s easy to say no one would voluntarily work in a sweatshop … when you have a comfy job in a rich Western country. And it’s easy to say no one in their right mind would be a prostitute … when you’re a repressed judgmental politico.

The more you look at these people, the more you realize that they are just like the religious fundamentalists they claim to despise. They want to impose their preferences — on sex, on work, on gender roles — on everyone else. They are convinced that their rules are right because of divine revelation (the Gospel According to St. Mckinnon). The can claim the high ground all they want. But in the end, their rhetoric reveals them for what they are.

I don’t have any objection to them having their views or even promoting them. But when they want to chain their moral view to the engine of the state, I get annoyed.

As far as I’m concerned, work is work. A whore isn’t on the dole, isn’t hurting anyone (unless they want her to) and is adding to the happiness of society. Who are they to judge that her line of work is unacceptable?

I don’t have any objection to them having their views or even promoting them. But when they want to chain their moral view to the engine of the state, I get annoyed.

Yes, precisely. I have nothing against their setting up a website or buying TV commercial time to try to convince hookers to quit or clients to stop seeing us; I have nothing against their approaching streetwalkers and asking if they’d like to hear the good news about Jesus, or even buying big billboards that say “prostitution is violence against women.” But their rights stop when they use lies or money to try to get politicians to persecute those who violate their personal beliefs.

These types of women do not believe women would choose sex work. They cant imagine a world where daddy doesn’t support and spoil them through adulthood and get them a nice cushy job at a non-profit. If a women is engaged in sex work it must be because they were oppressed and need to be rescued by their “betters”.

I was working waiting tables in a pizza joint. There was a strip club just up the street. This man used to occasionally stop in the pizza place. . One night, he left me a card and told me I ought to come to work for him. He managed a strip club.

I thought it over for over a week. I could work waitress, making lousy tips, running my legs off every night, or I could make a lot more. I chose the strip joint. I found other opportunities, nude model, porn, and eventually escort. All of it a better career than waitress.

For some reason, the human mind has tended towards the binary sense long beforeelectronic computers, and even before Charles Babbage. If it isn’t good, it’s bad; either we should encourage it, or we should ban it (how many times have you heard a lawmaker say that we can’t decriminalize prostitution/marijuana/teenagers screwing each other/whatever, because that would be condoning it and would send the wrong message?). And, of course, anything that isn’t conservative must be liberal, and anything that isn’t liberal must be conservative, which is why a lot of self-declared liberals assume that prostitution would have been legal a long time ago if it weren’t for those damned conservatives, and a lot of self-declared conservatives assume that it would have been legal a long time ago if it weren’t for those damned liberals.

Is this just part of the human condition, this binary mindset? Is it more Western in particular, rather than human in general? Is it an artifact of Judeo-Christo-Islamic values, where you’ve got God and Satan, and nothing exists without serving one or the other? Even Atheists, who reject God and Satan alike, are raised in this culture and seem to get awfully dualistic at times. Did the ancient Greeks or Norse or maybe modern Hindu, with their multitude of Gods, perhaps have a different outlook on things like this?

A very interesting question, Sailor Barsoom! My guess is that this tendency is not unique to humans, but rather is a long-used convenience for categorizing the world in a generally useful way using a minimum amount of storage capacity.

In a healthy mind, the bit is supplemented by a wealth of additional memories which clarify and flesh out the thing. Contradictory data? That will be represented.

In an unhealthy mind, the bit is allowed to be supplemented only by memories which reinforce it, and the weight of them provides a destructive feedback loop in which the brain’s meter pegs on overload. Such a person is frightened to the point of being life-threatening.

I do agree that it is possible to make binary thinking recede as one acquires wisdom. Let’s hope that a significant number of people achieve that feat!

I’d buy a dozen or more copies, keep a few for myself (you better autograph it for me dammit 🙂 and the others I would donate to our local used bookstore, leave a copy in the dr’s waiting room, bus stop, beauty parlor, police station, ER, and anywhere else there may be a waiting room that has reading materials. Yes I would.

Damn, but you write well! And with no shortage of cogent arguments to provide the substance, the iron fist in the velvet glove of well-phrased English. So to speak.

But your rather poignant, and quite accurate, description and analysis of the rather stark choices we all – or almost all of us – face in deciding what work we will do to put bread on the table reminds me of the aphorism that asserts, “There is many a woman [and probably no few men] who have kept the wolf from the door by letting him in.” It is, I think, an interesting question as to why that particular choice or option falls more, or is more available, to women – many argue that it is largely a question of biological evolution predicated on differential costs in creating a new soul and bringing it to term – with the particular perspective on the question being somewhat dependent on whether one emphasizes the costs or the benefits. But it is also, I think, a question of some import as I think it has no small amount of relevance to the question of societal attitudes on the profession, and, one hopes, its eventual legalization.

On the Meat Loaf album Bat Out of Hell there is a short dialogue between a man and woman in which he asks her, “On a hot summer night, will you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” My friend Philippa said her reply to that was, “Every fucking time.”

I like it, I like it a lot. Reminds me of the now generally accepted theory on the “origin of eukaryotic organelles” by the American biologist Lynn Margulis (1): basically the evolution of a predator-prey relationship into a symbiotic one.

But somewhat apropos of that, as well as relative to your cogent arguments about coercion, you might be interested in this article I tweeted to you (2) titled “Sex worker writes that prostitutes can enjoy their work” – the thought of which really seems to chap the hides of those most against legalizing the profession. Reminds me of an escort I was seeing for some period of time – possibly a year or more – who rather forcefully insisted that she had the best job in the world – a rather remarkable woman in many ways, most if not all of which had nothing to do with her talents in bed. I could have fallen in love with her in a heart-beat, or with the slightest amount of encouragement – which she very explicitly warned me she was unable or unwilling to give – a class act all the way.

But I love to see people who enjoy their work, more or less regardless of what it is. Reminds me of the alien character in Men in Black II who was sorting mail inside an electro-mechanical mail sorter – just a giv’n her.

I’m Catholic and I agree with you, Maggie. Institution has that tendency of looking at people more collectively and ignoring them as individual persons. That’s what standardized morality can do to you. Most people forget that we need to choose for ourselves and respect the choices of others without judging them. I think this stems from the fear of having to live with something you regret, and so people make sure you don’t make a ‘mistake,’ whereas they’re actually just telling not to do something they THINK is a mistake for THEM, without considering your ENTIRE situation.

I admire courtesans and have even been inspired by courtesan councilors (who serve sex but only personally prescribed sex based on a client’s personal need–after taking some time to talk in counseling).

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